Restricting automatic kernel-module loading

Windows was a bit forward-thinking here by coldplugging everything detected at OS install time and leaving the rest either on the install media, or in later versions when hard disk space became cheaper copying the packages but not installing them until needed. There's a clear delineation between tangible/common/“plug and play” drivers like USB drivers that always autoload (for better or worse) and weird stuff like packet sniffer virtual network interfaces that always require some degree of human intervention to enable.

Kitchen-sink distros need to adopt some of that model. The kernel itself could improve things, but the onus is really on the distros to provide sane defaults - that's their entire purpose.